


As a Distant Sky

by ninemoons42



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Concentration Camps, Dreams, Holocaust, Inspired by Art, M/M, Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-12
Updated: 2011-10-12
Packaged: 2017-10-24 13:31:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/264009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42





	As a Distant Sky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Loobeeinthesky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Loobeeinthesky/gifts).



title: As a Distant Sky  
author: [](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**ninemoons42**](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/)  
word count: 1876  
fandom: X-Men: First Class [movieverse]  
characters: Charles Xavier, Erik Lehnsherr, Sebastian Shaw, Emma Frost, Mystique [and the rest of the Brotherhood and of the X-Men]  
rating: R  
notes: Birthday fic for my beloved [](http://loobeeinthesky.livejournal.com/profile)[**loobeeinthesky**](http://loobeeinthesky.livejournal.com/) , who created [this amazing fanart](http://loobeeinthesky.tumblr.com/post/10852802442/because-i-missed-the-lovely-ninemoons-birthday-i) for my birthday. I have since taken the subject matter as the prompt for this story. Hope it suits you, Lucy my love.  
Trigger warnings: discussion of the Holocaust and concentration camps; revenge and angst.

  
Erik stops dreaming on the night he watches his mother die, on the night he destroys _Herr Doktor_ Schmidt's laboratory.

After a while, he begins to forget that the dreams even existed; he begins to stop missing them. Why should he? Here is a place on earth where dreams and hope cannot abide, where prayers cannot be heard.

There is no use for the Torah in the camps. There is no god walking beneath the barbed wire. There are no ministering spirits carrying off the bodies and the souls of the men and women and children.

Erik used to dream of Elijah, used to dream he'd come into the falling-down desolation of the ghetto and lead them all out to freedom – but if the prophet never comes Erik's not sure he can really blame him for breaking his oath.

This is no world to be living in, and there is no deliverance even in sleep or in death.

Everyone clad in tatters and rags and those hateful stripes – Erik may never look at blue the same way again – and the gaping wounds of the tattoos on their arms. Blue and ash and black and death's heads. Erik doesn't dream of them – he doesn't dream, now – and that, perhaps, is a shred of comfort. Not a gift from on high, not something from his mother; no way to escape, bleak black sleep that doesn't bring him any rest.

///

The hunt becomes his life in the months and years after liberation.

He never knows whether to feel relieved or desperately angry about losing Schmidt to the turmoil of early 1945: the camps were being abandoned, the Nazis were beginning to panic, and then in the chaos of the death marches he'd simply been thrust out into the cruel winter, and the last memory he had of _Herr Doktor_ was of swearing and throwing down his scalpels, of being nearly dragged out the door. Leaving Erik on the marble slab, bleeding sluggishly.

He remembers being stuck there for a day, perhaps two, before someone finally entered the room and freed him – and that one a boy of a soldier, his uniform too big for him. Erik had taken his coat and wrapped it around himself, hiding the scars and the stitches and his protruding ribs.

Now his days are given over to research, his nights to the endless hunt. He draws the faces of the men in Schmidt's endless spiderwebs; he spends blood money like a profligate. No one looks twice at him. He comes and he goes through the cities of Europe; he kills men with knives and weapons and his bare hands.

He kills with metal, most of the time, and he feels an unholy exhilaration in his veins as he gets blood on his hands. His abilities are beginning to grow along with him, and little by little he begins to sense the iron flowing through his own veins, the iron in the red blood he spills over carpet and marble and polished wood and grimy tile.

Revenge like razor wire threading into his heart, weaving an invisible net around his hands, a thick snarl of it in the pit of his belly. Almost as palpable to him now as the beat of his heart, as heavy as the coin he keeps next to his skin at all times.

He doesn't dream of the men that he kills, and he doesn't need to dream about Schmidt.

///

All of Erik's nightmares come true on a balmy night in Miami.

 _Caspartina._ The woman who attacks him, fatal blast of memory, the things he'd escaped because he'd escaped his dreams. He isn't Frankenstein's monster after all. The submarine, the chains, salt clinging to his skin, Schmidt – Shaw – nameless inexhaustible evil – getting away.

He draws a desperate breath and goes under again. The unbelievable weight of his rage – his anchor, the source of his abilities, and also the great darkness bearing him inexorably down.

Erik reaches out to the _Caspartina_ and he knows it's hopeless.

He wonders what kind of dreams he'll have if he dies here, if he drowns to join the endlessly slumbering wrecks – burr of corrosion and iron heavy on his tongue. He opens his mouth to shout, and the ocean carefully wraps silence and drugging sleep around him.

 _Let it go! Erik!_

Bright pure wave of blue light behind his closed eyes. Darker shades within the blue, hands reaching out to him.

 _Follow me up, you need to breathe, you are not dying here, not tonight._

Waves and wind and wailing alarms.

Erik only has eyes for the man treading water next to him, the man who still has his hands clamped around Erik's wrist. Blue eyes, the first blue Erik's ever seen and not wanted to turn away from, since summer skies over his childhood home.

 _Hello, Erik. I'm Charles._

“I always thought I was – ” _a monster a freak a killer a damned soul_ “ – alone.”

“You're not alone.”

Blue, and Erik reaches out to him.

///

That night, on his rickety narrow bed in the CIA facility – that he actually is in a bed and in a room instead of on a pallet in some dank cell is something he doesn't understand, though he instinctively thinks it might have something to do with Charles, Charles the _mutant_ the _telepath_ – Erik dreams.

Formless shadows and distant smiles. Memories of his family when they were still all together, still allowed to laugh. Sharp scent of cut hay, cinnamon and sugar and tea, voices raised in Sabbath song.

There are no faces, but Erik doesn't need to dream about his family to know that they are there.

In the morning Charles says good morning over some kind of book, and Erik nods and takes his coffee outside, but not before he notices that the book is bound in battered blue leather, and bears a star of David on the spine.

///

In the days after the flight to Westchester, Erik feels rage and grief in every wall and every room of the great house. For all that Charles and Raven had made light of it as they stood on its threshold, there is a very real shadow looming over the house. Pain behind locked doors – the unhappy twist in Raven's smile, whether in her false form or in her blue – the rigidness in Charles's shoulders.

Erik throws himself into training with a will, because he doesn't understand, because there are all kinds of dreams haunting the corners of the rooms and he doesn't want to be involved. He needs to keep his distance.

The day Charles challenges him to turn the massive satellite dish Erik nearly says “No”. For the first time in a long while, he can remember nights of tranquility, nights free from rage. He has been dreaming of making bread and of chopping wood. Simple things. Milk in a pale ivory pitcher; wild roses climbing the outside walls and twining flowers into the wooden fences.

He misses these things, misses the peace that has been eluding him since he'd been taken into the camps, since his mother had died because he couldn't move the coin. He's afraid that he misses the rage that he needs to function, the rage he needs in order to grasp metal and magnetic fields.

“A point between rage and serenity,” Charles says, and he asks for permission, and Erik doesn't know why he nods.

Candles and Hanukkah, a battered old menorah, his mother's eyes full of pride.

His mother's face.

A face he hasn't seen in years, not even in his dreams, where she might have been a source of comfort and strength.

In tears, Erik reaches out to the satellite dish again and the face of his mother slides away, and instead he sees a man with blue eyes, eyes electric blue with sadness and envy and relief.

The satellite dish moves with his barest command.

///

Erik employs the same trick in his mind when he lifts the submarine.

His mother and her smile. Charles and his voice and his eyes and the insane trust Charles has placed in Erik.

Charles claims to know everything about Erik – and he trusts him anyway.

Insanity.

The kind of _mitzvah_ he can't ever return, because there is nothing left in Erik to carry the weight of trust. That, too, had been taken away from him – and he doesn't believe it can be restored, not even when his mother's memory was given back.

But he clings to Charles's voice speaking in his mind, leading him inexorably onwards. The point between rage and serenity, blue horizon in Erik's mind: as blue as Charles's eyes.

///

After Cuba and its sky and its sea, Erik flees from blue once again – he strips off the suit and the helmet, and he returns to red, with what is almost relief and what is almost fear warring in his mind. It's always been his color, red for blood and loss, for shattering pain.

He wears the helmet at all times. He doesn't want to be found. He doesn't want to trust himself any more. The weight of the material on his head is a reminder, a faint comparison, to the weight closed around his heart.

///

Now when Erik dreams, he dreams in red. Himself, standing over broken bodies – over _Charles's_ broken body.

He finds out about Charles and his wheelchair when they finally face each other in battle for the first time.

He cannot meet Charles's eyes; he cannot listen to Charles's words.

He cannot look into the other man's face for fear of being lost to that blue once again.

///

The call comes and it's strong enough to pierce the helmet itself, and he looks blankly at Emma as her face contorts in shock, at Azazel as he snaps out his hands to the others.

Erik reaches for Mystique's blue hand and doesn't even ask where they're going, or _why_.

///

Erik doesn't see the overturned wheelchair, crumpled and smoking. He doesn't see the children in their yellow and blue suits, battered and bruised and suspicious. He doesn't see the Blackbird, obviously rebuilt and now grounded yet again.

He only has eyes for Charles, face down and arms flung out. Ridiculous gloves – and Erik looks down at his own hands.

Charles covers his thumbs but leaves his fingertips free – telepathic contact is eased with physical touch.

Erik covers his fingertips and leaves his thumbs free – it allows him to easily contact the metal in an object. A habit forged by Schmidt's coin.

None of that matters in this moment, as Erik runs his hands over Charles's back. He remembers the wound suddenly, the bloody break in Charles's skin where Moira's bullet had impacted.

He turns Charles over with shaking hands and – Erik catches his breath, feels his heart knock painfully against his ribs.

Blood streaming from Charles's nose, a thin crimson trickle staining his mouth. His eyes are closed.

For the first time since Cuba, Erik wants to see blue again.  



End file.
